Solidarity Economies and the Unmaking of Racial Capitalism

Solidarity at Urban Scales

Unlike most scholarship on the solidarity economy, which largely focuses on local and national projects, our inquiry proceeds at the scale of cities. Why is it important to study urban solidarity economies? Urban scholars have long debated the symbolic and material significance of cities, and several facets of urban life make it particularly salient for studying solidarity economies. Contemporary cities play a formidable role in national economies and globally. Large flows of people, information, capital, and cultural and technological innovation connect urban centers directly while world cities like New York act as command-and-control centers of the global economy. Cities also concentrate people, capital, and resources in ways that can benefit and challenge solidarity economy formations just as they do conventional economic organizations.

Municipalities also operate at a crucial meso-level of governance that can command greater resources than individual neighborhoods can, while still being more approachable for community action than state- and federal-level governance. Interventions (like the Iglesias Garden’s land-preservation campaign) have a greater chance to be successful because it is possible to establish a dialogue (however limited at this time and age) between local solidarity economy movements and city policymakers. Persuading elected city council members who support economic alternatives is more feasible at local levels and can lead to the reallocation of resources from capitalist-centered projects to those based on solidarity and common good.14 Accordingly, there is often a sense of possibility at the city level, of starting something that makes a difference for many people and being able to accomplish it. Cities, in fact, produce solidarity economies in high concentration. And, as crucibles of human interaction and encounter, they provide a stage for negotiating alternatives with particular intensity in the context of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences that reflect both larger shared histories of racial capitalism and human solidarity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of place.

For all of these reasons, we do not regard urban solidarity economies as activities that just happen to take place in cities. Rather, we see them as mutually constitutive of cities and urban geographies.15 We hope this book helps to inaugurate such ways of thinking.

These considerations inform our analysis of New York City, Philadelphia, and Worcester—cities that range in scale from a global metropolis to a smaller city of regional significance. Studying differently sized cities offers a fuller sense of the variation in solidarity economy formations across urban scales. Proximate to one another along the East Coast of the United States, the three cities have been shaped by many of the same regional and global urban processes. Dating back to colonial land grabs, they rapidly grew in population and rose to prominence as industrial cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each subsequently struggled to redefine itself with the deindustrialization that followed. Like many U.S. cities, they currently grapple with gentrification, racialized forms of poverty, and deep economic inequality. Of particular relevance for our study, each city also has an active, self-identified solidarity economy movement working on urban and state policies, actions, and campaigns. Such commonalities notwithstanding, the cities have their own distinct histories, geographies, race and poverty dynamics, and cultures of economic activism. In short, we are drawn to these cities for both the generalities and the particularities of place. Below, we provide some rudimentary sketches of the individual cities, reserving greater detail for subsequent chapters. Table 1 helps to see how they compare on key socioeconomic indicators.

Contention One: Escaping Capitalocentrism and Seeing Solidarity Economies (Which Are Bigger Than People Think!)

In order to ascertain the significance of the solidarity economy, we must first be able to perceive its size and dimensions. As mentioned earlier, this is a challenge when the prevailing worldview relegates virtually all noncapitalist economic alternatives to the margins. In order to see the solidarity economy, there must first be some conceptual ground clearing. In this vein, the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham and the diverse economies approach they inaugurated are especially helpful for identifying and categorizing diverse noncapitalist practices.

Earlier, we referred to Gibson-Graham’s concept of capitalocentrism to point to how the discursive dominance of capitalism limits our capacity to see and imagine economic diversity. They call for us to read the economy “for difference rather than dominance,” which is an invitation to understand the economy as radically heterogeneous and not reducible to a singular capitalist system or space.24 Using the metaphor of the economy as an iceberg, community economies scholars powerfully argue that although the tip of the iceberg representing capitalism is all that is visible above the water, a whole economic world exists below the surface, invisible, but extant and looming (see Plate 1). Much of this world is driven by human solidarity instead of the profit motive and is oriented to livelihoods instead of wealth accumulation.

In teaching the image, we have witnessed the moment of awareness when students or interlocutors come to recognize that economic life is always much more than capitalist. The iceberg metaphor draws attention to a huge array of noncapitalist economic practices of social reproduction and solidarity that are central to the way our world operates. Those practices occupy much of people’s time and labor, especially in economically disadvantaged communities, but are nevertheless typically ignored as important constituents of “the economy.”

Learning to see economic diversity is an important step, but it only goes so far toward building more livable worlds. Some of the most brutal types of economic oppression, including slavery and patriarchy, also take noncapitalist forms. It is consequently important to develop a basis for evaluating economic diversity. Accordingly, in addition to relaxing the grip of capitalocentrism, and thereby making it easier to see noncapitalist and also nonexploitative and nonoppressive practices, the diverse economies approach provides a framework for enrolling such practices into a politics of class transformation. This is grounded in an antiessentialist notion of class as a process. Unlike conventional views of class, which center on socioeconomic groups defined by income, wealth, and status, this approach uses class to talk about the multiple ways people participate in the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus.25 Class positions, from this perspective, are not static. Instead, individuals are seen as participating in multiple class processes and as having class positions that fluctuate with different activities. Individuals might, for example, earn wages at work, produce unpaid goods and services within a household, and grow food in a community garden. They might borrow money with a credit card, gift food at potlucks, and hire tutors to help with schoolwork. In one way or another, each of these is linked to class processes of surplus production and use. Each activity is consequently also a potential site for interventions to combat exploitation and renegotiate the ethical terms of economic interdependence. What follows from this is a different conception of a class politics. As Gibson-Graham write:

Projects of class transformation are therefore always possible and do not necessarily involve social upheaval and hegemonic transition. Class struggles do not necessarily take place between groups of people whose identities are constituted by the objective reality and subjective consciousness of a particular location in a social structure. Rather, they take place whenever there is an attempt to change the way in which surplus labor is produced, appropriated, or distributed.26

Class transformation away from capitalism, therefore, can occur not only as a single large-scale and dramatic event (e.g., a revolution) but in many sites and at many scales, including in the micropolitics of everyday life in the diverse places people live, work, and consume, and whenever there are attempts to change the way surplus is handled. Solidarity economy initiatives offer interventions capable of changing class processes in all those everyday sites.

Examining the economic landscape through such a class lens entails more than looking at the differences between those with the lowest income and those with the highest; it requires that we differentiate between economies that are and are not rooted in exploitation. Exploitation occurs when one group or individual appropriates surplus produced by others, such as when corporation owners enrich themselves through surplus created by wageworkers (e.g., capitalist exploitation) or when a patriarch appropriates surplus produced by other household members through unpaid work (e.g., exploitation in social reproduction). When, by contrast, people produce, appropriate, or distribute surplus collectively—such as in a worker cooperative, community garden, or any other type of solidarity economy initiative—they are already engaging in postcapitalist economies. Here, the post in postcapitalist is not an apolitical description but rather an expression of the desire to move away from capitalism to a society without exploitation, in whatever ways possible. What matters, then, is not primarily that there are women CEOs or some people born into economic hardship that make it into the elite but rather that social systems are reoriented to minimize the exploitative private appropriation of surplus wealth while maximizing its redistribution in ways that support the many rather than the few. The solidarity economy is one way to move us closer to this goal.

Looking at the solidarity economy shifts the focus to nonexploitative class processes and how they produce urban space in a myriad of sites. Consequently, researching and mapping the solidarity economy is a way to consolidate an image of a different economy and its geographic patterns. In this book, we rely on a subversive form of counter-mapping as part of a postcapitalist politics. As we show in chapter 1, counter-mapping can serve both critical and constructive roles. It can illuminate the underbelly of extraction and also work toward emancipatory possibilities by showing alternative economic practices and their role in sustaining communities. Counter-mapping, as Kevin St. Martin writes, “is not only an effective method for reclaiming material resources for those who have been dispossessed but it works to counter particular forms of economic subjectivity and space; it inserts a non-capitalist presence into locations where only a capitalist potential had been identified.”27 A host of diverse-economies scholars (including the four of us) have used various forms of asset-mapping, community-mapping, and other participatory-action research projects to show a multitude of postcapitalist practices and initiatives around the world. Importantly, when people examining postcapitalist practices document them, it opens the conversation about possibilities for the future.28 This book follows in that tradition by mapping urban spaces in which postcapitalist practices have taken root.

Contention Two: Seeing Fault Lines—Race, Poverty, and the Solidarity City

Solidarity is at the heart of our vision of the Solidarity City. Earlier, we defined solidarity in relatively simple terms as a matter of collective responsibility and shared purpose. In practice, there is more to the concept than this. Solidarity is not merely a form of exchange. As Robin D. G. Kelley writes, “It’s not, you need to give us your love and we’ll give you ours!”39 Nor is it about saving others—a point conveyed by the popular slogan “Solidarity, not charity.” It is instead, in Ruha Benjamin’s words, about understanding that “my well-being is intimately bound up with yours.”40 Crucially, such interdependence is not confined to those with whom one easily identifies, nor should solidarity be so limited. To quote Kelley again: “Part of solidarity is the people you don’t recognize. The people who you don’t see yourself in.”41 The whole point of solidarity is to find common cause across difference. And in the U.S. context, differences across income and race are vast indeed.

In highly segregated urban environments, appeals to solidarity can offer hope of bridging social divides in order to address inequalities and relieve suffering. As anyone who has been extensively involved in grassroots activism knows, however, it is one thing to espouse solidarity commitments and quite something else to fully realize them. When solidarity dreams are not followed by solidarity deeds, it can do harm. As one activist described to us, “solidarity is a hurtful word” when expressions of solidarity are not accompanied by substantive support when people are most in need.42 This activist’s comments were directed at anti-Black racism and the virtue signaling of liberal individuals who do not practice the solidarity they preach or who do so through limited practices such as tokenism. Such concerns animate this book.

We have encountered similar critiques at different levels of the movement. In our interactions with various communities, we have heard competing characterizations of solidarity economy initiatives such as cooperatives, community gardens, credit unions, and community-supported agriculture (CSAs). In some cases, we have heard them characterized as crucial resources for cash-strapped communities and for marginalized neighborhoods of color. In other cases, we have even heard solidarity economies described as luxuries catering to affluent white populations with more disposable income.

We have also witnessed movement leaders get called out for the way they have avoided race as a topic while centering white perspectives and men in leadership roles.43 As activist Elandria Williams describes, “A lot of the time what has been missing in the conversation in the US and Europe especially is the way that race plays a factor in economics and in our lives. And if the decolonization process doesn’t happen in our communities and in knowledge, then we truly can’t have a solidarity economy.”44 Along similar lines, Caroline Shenaz Hossein describes how social and solidarity economy scholarship and practice have “largely ignored the context, rich histories, theories, and lived experience of Black peoples.”45 If the solidarity economy movement is to truly achieve its goals, she contends, it needs to more fully engage with Black epistemologies and what she describes as the Black social economy. We agree.

Our experiences of the past ten years have convinced us that solidarity economy initiatives are finding their way toward the Solidarity City as a space of racial and economic justice. However, we also recognize that all these thousands of entities exist in a world fraught with conflict and contradiction. Alongside other scholars, we understand that questions of race, poverty, and gender, as well as other dimensions of difference, have not been resolved within the Solidarity Economy movement.

This book is an effort to directly confront these issues in systematic and novel ways. Our approach engages the subject matter at the aggregate level of urban space. We specifically map different elements of the solidarity economy against geographies of race and poverty and ask hard questions about whether the solidarity economy’s composition and spatial distribution are skewed in ways that reproduce rather than transform underlying divisions. Complementing our geospatial analysis, we examine qualitatively how individual solidarity economy organizations manage urban spaces and navigate relationships and encounters across racial and economic difference.

Recognizing that solidarity is necessary but hard work, the critiques we engage aim to more fully realize the movement’s aspirations. If the solidarity aspect of solidarity economies is to have real significance, the movement must learn to see and confront the deep histories of racism and economic marginalization that pattern both present-day geographies and contemporary modes of thought. We need conceptual frameworks to comprehend such dynamics. For this, we draw inspiration and insight from theories of racial capitalism and Black geographies, as well as relational poverty. This scholarship helps us understand the social fault lines of race and poverty as they shape and are reshaped by solidarity economies.

Over the past several years, the concept of racial capitalism has spread rapidly within activist and academic circles. They evolve from Cedric J. Robinson’s original formulations that date back forty years.46 As a shorthand, racial capitalism has come to refer to Black disposability, white supremacy, and the systemic racialized dynamics of exploitation and impoverishment. The term racial capitalism also refers to a body of scholarship that initially emerged as an important corrective to earlier theorizations of class, class struggle, and capitalism. Whereas many liberal and Marxist accounts of capitalist economies tend to treat racial relations as peripheral to market logics and class antagonisms, theorists of racial capitalism reveal how capitalist development in the United States and elsewhere is fundamentally intertwined with processes of racialization.47 From this perspective, racial capitalism is not simply one variation of capitalism, as if there were processes of capitalism separate from race. Rather, capitalism has operated through racial differentiation from its very beginnings. In Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s memorable phrase, “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.”48 In this respect, capitalism is racial capitalism, something that is particularly evident in the U.S. context.49 More than merely an argument about history, the racial capitalism framework provides analytic tools for comprehending how race and class are intertwined. It solicits the study of the different contexts and modalities through which racialized forms of economic privilege, exploitation, and dispossession occur both historically and today, including, at times, within progressive economic movements such as the one we study.50

Given our interest in cities, we are particularly focused on the application of the racial capitalist framework to urban settings. A rapidly evolving body of scholarship is doing this work, further illuminating how “urbanization processes are rooted in constructions of race, racialization, and differentiation.”51 We see obvious evidence of such dynamics in U.S. cities, where racialized histories of segregation, redlining, dispossession, gentrification, and migration have profoundly carved fault lines into urban neighborhoods. Although the meaning of whiteness has shifted over time, racial capitalism has consistently privileged white places and populations to ensure their development, while other communities, especially Black and Brown ones, have experienced brutal marginalization, violence, incarceration, and premature death.52 But life in those communities is more than that. As scholarship coming from the field of Black geographies has insisted, focusing on Black practices of survival, resistance, and liberation in the face of brutal dynamics of racial capitalism illuminates lives infused with solidarity. Clyde Woods poetically calls these practices and associated knowledges “blues epistemologies.”53 These push-and-pull, resist-and-build-anew dynamics at the intersections of race, space, and place within each city have given rise to solidarity economies in Black and immigrant neighborhoods.

Additional insights into how racialized poverty and wealth fundamentally define and negate life possibilities and also play out within the solidarity economy come to us from relational poverty and other literatures that seek to radically rethink poverty. Against dominant tendencies to see poverty as an intrinsic cultural or individual fault of the people experiencing poverty, relational poverty scholars emphasize the underlying relational dynamics that give rise to both wealth and poverty, and they underscore how the production of poverty is endemic (not accidental) to capitalist class processes. They also offer fuller measures of poverty than found in conventional approaches, which tend to dramatically underestimate its true extent. The Poor People’s Campaign, for example, uses supplemental measures of poverty that show that 140 million Americans (almost half the U.S. population) lived without basic needs being met in 2019, even before the pandemic.54 In this book, we also measure income differentiation in terms of multiples of the federal poverty line, an approach that helps gain deeper insights into how solidarity economy initiatives might either transform poverty dynamics or reproduce them.

As critiques of racial capitalism have gained importance within academic and activist circles, they have also inspired deeper racial analyses within both diverse economies and solidarity economy literatures.55 Nonetheless, the evocation of racial capitalism can also reproduce capitalocentric habits of thought that, unwittingly, work against a transformational politics. Specifically, if racial capitalism becomes that which determines everything, a totality in which there is no outside, then, once again, there is no space for postcapitalist possibilities in this world. Here we may fight on as a matter of survival, but transformation becomes unimaginable. How do we break away? How can we restore a shared sense of the possible while also keeping the problem in sight?

For such endeavors, the racial capitalism and Black geographies literatures themselves offer rich historiographic accounts of collective resistance and cooperation that weaken capitalocentrist narratives. We see this, for example, inside the influential scholarship of Cedric J. Robinson, whose own analysis is far from capitalocentric. Alongside his attention to the racialized processes of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, Robinson equally emphasizes a long history of theory and practice where people unsettle exploitative economies while building up cooperative alternatives. He traces the history of class consciousness in medieval Europe, noting forms of communism in Christian and peasant communes that rejected feudal hierarchies, long before the emergence of Marxism.56 Like W. E. B. Du Bois before him, Robinson also recounts how Africans brought communal definitions of economic life with them across the ocean.57 These communal economies were especially influential in the radical history of maroon societies, where formerly enslaved people endeavored cooperatively to sustain livelihoods and engaged in antiexploitation struggle against slave states and colonial powers.58

Beyond Robinson, a growing number of newer works have further explored the history and geography of cooperatives and mutuality—especially within the Black diaspora and among Indigenous and Latinx communities—as a way to move beyond racial capitalism.59 Seeing how those practices permeate all kinds of societies, we can begin recognizing them as not just a particular group’s history but human history writ large. David Graeber and David Wengrow illuminate this with their tour-de-force rereading of prehistory, The Dawn of Everything, in which they displace the mythology that “inequality is inevitable” with evidence that for thousands of years people lived in a diversity of social forms, including vast cities organized as collectivities. In this light, the racial capitalism framework does not need to reify capitalism; rather, it can heighten awareness of racialization processes and orient us to seek out noncapitalist and explicitly nonracist alternatives.

Of course, the fault lines that divide U.S. society are many. Being open-eyed and informed about how underlying fault lines shape solidarity economies is one step toward realizing solidarity cities. But it also takes action. As we discuss in chapter 3, where we examine a unique solidarity economy organization and cooperative space in Worcester, enacting true solidarity across significant differences is hard. It requires sacrifice and persistence, and it can be fraught with all-too-human contradictions and conflicts. It also often falls short. It is precisely because such solidarity is both so necessary and so difficult that the principles of the solidarity economy are so important for guiding the movement away from racial capitalism.

Contention Three: Better Solutions—Confronting Racial Capitalism through Postcapitalist Worldmaking

With this, we arrive at the third major contention of the book: namely, that the solidarity economy movement itself provides resources for confronting racial capitalism and for transforming racial and economic divides. When economic initiatives are built around prosocial values such as cooperation, mutuality, reciprocity, community, sustainability, and solidarity, these values become normative touchpoints that orient behavior toward justice and collective welfare. Even when existing behavior falls short, the value commitments provide a basis for seeking accountability and improvement. Additionally, iterative experiences of cooperative governance tend to deepen democratic education, cultivating skill sets for healthy collaboration, elevating aspirations for justice, and familiarizing practitioners with what it takes to live and work across differences. For us, this is all imbued in the idea of the Solidarity City.

We are not alone in our efforts to conceive of urban solidarity economies, nor are we the first to use the term Solidarity City. We first encountered the term early in our research through our interactions with SolidarityNYC, an activist group that periodically used the term in its advocacy for cooperative development and for local strategies and policies around solidarity economies in New York City.60 Activists in Europe and Latin America have used the term Solidarity Cities in a different sense: to refer to grassroots campaigns to envision refuge or sanctuary cities where all are welcome and no human is treated as illegal.61

Most prominently in the U.S. context, the term Solidarity City is also being used by both activists and intellectuals along the banks of the Mississippi River, in Jackson, Mississippi. This city, where over 80 percent of the population is Black and a quarter live below the poverty line, has become the site of some of the most radical solidarity economy organizing in the country. Residents of Jackson have twice elected Black mayors (Chokwe Lumumba in 2013 and Chokwe Antar Lumumba in 2017) explicitly committed to the “development of the Solidarity Economy,” the advancement of the Black working class, and “the anti-capitalist struggle for economic democracy as a prelude towards the democratic transition to eco-socialism.”62

Leading the way is Cooperation Jackson, a grassroots organization dedicated to economic and racial justice and to using worker cooperatives to organize the Black and Latinx underclass into catalysts for systemic change. For Cooperation Jackson, the concept of a Solidarity City constitutes only one aspect of a multipart political agenda to generate “green worker, self-managed cooperatives and an extensive network of mutual aid and social solidarity programs, organizations and institutions.”63 While Cooperation Jackson has thus far realized only a small portion of its ambitious agenda, it is hard to overestimate the influence its vision has had on the U.S. solidarity economy movement. Cooperation Jackson has done more than any other organization to build out a new radical urban spatial imaginary. Over recent years, the solidarity economy movement has increasingly embraced or adapted the “Build and Fight” slogan and approach advanced by Cooperation Jackson and has also gradually shifted its agendas and leadership structures to prioritize lower-income communities and to fight against the disposability of Black life.

We, too, draw considerable inspiration from this vision when writing about Solidarity Cities in this book.64 It is a vision that highlights and affirms the agency and worldmaking practices of subjects who, despite occupying spaces made marginal within the dominant social and spatial order, build community around collective and hopeful ways of belonging.65

It takes effort and time to “see” solidarity economies in cities, but once we do, we begin to recognize their spatial patterns and impact on place. In subsequent chapters, we analyze the solidarity economy by sector and identify two major patterns that are distinct from the fault line patterns we have already alluded to: what we characterize as “edge zones” and “bulwarks.”

In our opening vignette, we saw how the Iglesias Garden creates edge zones that extend solidarity among people from different backgrounds. Located along the diverse edge between predominantly Latinx and Black neighborhoods in North Philadelphia, and drawing in allies from across the city, the garden is a zone of encounter where people of different ages, races, ethnicities, and cultures learn and work together in common cause. This case study exemplifies a more general pattern of certain solidarity economy initiatives cultivating spaces that bridge racial and poverty divides. Chapter 3 explores this process with attendant challenges on the microlevel of a cooperatively run activist space in Worcester. In chapter 5 we expand the scale to the spatial clustering of all Philadelphia cooperatives in demographically diverse spaces situated between otherwise segregated neighborhoods. As edge zones often manifest unique forms of cultural abundance and flow, they resemble what ecobiologists refer to as rich transitional ecotones between distinct ecosystems. These contexts give rise to a disproportionate number of cooperatives and create opportunities for them to negotiate across racial and wealth differences.

In addition to exemplifying an edge zone pattern, the Iglesias and Norris Square gardens also reveal a core aspect of the spatial pattern of bulwarks. They demonstrate the power of solidarity-based economic initiatives to act as defense against gentrification, blight, and other adverse consequences of racialized dynamics within the dominant economy. This is one of the most important roles that the solidarity economy plays within urban neighborhoods. Crucially, however, these are not just accounts of resistance against various racial capitalist processes; they are also accounts of creation and transformation, or what various scholars and activists, following Cooperation Jackson, alternately describe as “build and fight,” “oppose and propose,” “resist and build,” or “defend, develop, and decolonize.”66 We take up the theme of bulwarks more fully in chapter 6, where we analyze how credit unions, housing cooperatives, and worker cooperatives in New York City defend against exclusion, displacement, and predation and build local economic well-being.

Reading our three contentions together, we might say that they are about learning to see how solidarity sustains cities, learning to see and work across divisions, and seeking just transformation. More concretely, we might conclude that even though the solidarity economy has some of the same problems as the larger society, it is bigger than commonly supposed and offers better solutions to the challenge of how to live well together. We explore this in the chapters to follow. At their most hopeful, solidarity economy initiatives can deepen desire for a postcapitalist world, enlarge footprints, strengthen connections, enlist growing numbers of people, and scale up to urban areas and regions, nationally and internationally, moving from a constellation of solidarity economies within a city—a Solidarity City—to constellations of Solidarity Cities across the world. For us, this perspective enables a way of conceptualizing the Solidarity City as something spanning time, stretching from our present to a past needing excavation, and to an equitable and sustainable future full of potential.